We're Dating?

I have a tendency to let relationships build kind of... as they’re going to, and this largely stems from a fear of being more invested than the other person and showing weakness by asking the “so what are we?” question.

It leads to some moments like

“we’ve been talking regularly for 10 months, I flew down to Texas to spend a week with you at the first opportunity that presented itself, we’ve kissed and shared a lot of important life info and moments........” 

“oh, we’re dating?? We’re partners? Yeah, obviously! I knew that! For sure!”


And then the question is “but when did we start dating? When did this go from being good friends who flirt a lot to being partners who are... idk, whatever partners are?” And this question has multiple sources/desired answers-
“what’s the difference between partners and not-yet-partners?”
“how long have we thought of each other as people we want to keep around for awhile and form this connection with?”
“when is our anniversary???” (This one is mostly for me, my partners don’t tend to track these things as much as I do)
“How did I miss this as a definition of our relationship for however long?”

I’m just saying, poly has really not made my dating life any less confusing, words are fake (even if I really like them), and damn do I need to work on believing people also like me.

The future is fake

Remembering that time is a thing and the future is a thing is sometimes difficult for me.

Not everything has to happen right now. Some things can be depended upon to last. The people that I love aren't going to disappear. Relationships can move at their own pace.

Romantic Love

Romantic love is difficult to qualify or quantify or make any sense of. People talk about it all the time, there are songs and books and poems that all try to make sense of it. Defining it is tricky, however, and it gets more so when you start to look outside of heteronormativity, monogamy, and the relationship escalator.

I can tell you that romantic love, for me, is different from friend love, family love, puppy love... It feels like warm honey in the sun, golden and liquid. It feels like tiny fireworks going off in my brain. It is tied to a few people in my life, and it usually starts with a heavy dose of apprehension because it's something I feel all the way, every single time.

My concept of romantic love is complicated by my friend Spencer. Spencer is someone I have been friends with since April of 2012, and when we first started talking I fell head over heels for them within weeks. I expressed my interest and affection, I was gently rebuffed, and I was a broken little heap for a couple days. I revived. I recovered. I didn't lose that spark. Spencer and I lived in the same dorm freshman year of college, and I went to see them whenever I could. I listened to stories about their life and classes, I sat on their floor while they did homework, I adjusted every time they changed their name or pronouns, and listened every time they expressed their identity and orientation differently.

I expected nothing. After I asked the first time, I never again told them I wanted to date. I didn't want to date. I wanted them to be happy, to be part of my life, to thrive in their environment and relationships. I wanted to support that in any way that I could. I've spent a few years now watching Spencer from afar as they do all of these things, and as they become the person they've always wanted to become. And I still feel that spark, that liquid gold, that certainty of affection. This person will always be my person.

My love for my friend Whitney is a different kind of love. It's bright and happy and sometimes exasperated and protective. It's standing up for her when she can't stand up for herself, and it's her reminding me that my feelings are important even when I want to prioritize other people. We have steel cables connecting us across the miles and time. This person will always be my person.

Ben and Jakal are my people, too. My partners. Honey in the sun, fireworks in the brain, butterflies in the stomach affection and joy and anticipation. The building of something new and beautiful. Still learning each other, still reaching out at random times just to feel the warmth and reality of each other. Reassurance and emotional support and jokes and sharing. Building lives that entwine and entangle and converge. These are different, and they do not come with the certainty of forever, but they come with the certainty of "right now, forever." One of my favorite lines of poetry that I've ever encountered is from "How It Ends" by Andrea Gibson.

"But whatever

Whenever
However this ends,
I want you to know, that right now,
I love you forever."

Butterfly Magic

March 2018

One of the best moments of this past weekend for me, in which I celebrated my upcoming birthday (Wednesday 21st!) with my boyfriend was this:

Standing in the gem vault at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, surrounded by literal shining decadence, wearing my princess outfit that looked just as good in reality as it did in my head, listening as Bach’s Solo Cello Suite No. 5 played just loud enough. I closed my eyes and swayed to the music and felt just as good as I believed I should feel when celebrating myself and my accomplishments and survival over the past year. We’d been at the museum for 6 and a half hours, and I still liked it, myself, and Benjamin.

Sometimes magic is in little pieces, all handed to you at one time. Thank you, love, for standing in the magic with me.

What's "enough"?

I am the kind of person who, when I want to be on the phone with you, will be sad when I have to get off the phone, no matter how long we talked. 1 hour? Sad. 2 hours? Sad. I’ve had a couple conversations go 4 hours and I’m still a little whiny about getting off the phone. One of the first conversations I had with a guy I dated lasted 6 hours.


If talking is the only way I get to connect with you on a regular basis, the concept of “enough” doesn’t exist.

Andrea Gibson

Jan 2018

“...you often find it easier to explain your gender by saying you are happiest on the road, when you’re not here or there, but in between. That yellow line running down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam.” Your Life by Andrea Gibson

On Friday I saw Andrea Gibson and I got to share the experience with Benjamin who had never heard them before, Robyn who has seen them at least twice before like me, and James whose exposure I know nothing about.

I loved hearing Andrea and seeing them, and watching the people I love enjoy them too. Thank you for giving me the exact emotional weight and emotional release I needed.

Personality Disorder

People in the mental health community, both people with mental health issues and people who advocate for them, have been working pretty hard over the past few years to change the narrative around mental health and dating. To change the language around dating so that it doesn't just blame the mentally ill person for everything in the relationship. So that the weight of carrying the relationship is on all people involved. That the burden of understanding and self-correction is on all people involved.

The exception seems to be personality disorders. The "advice" around dating people with personality disorders is all about managing their symptoms, controlling their ability to hurt you, I even saw one talking about using compliments as rewards for good behavior and I want to scream. People want to say that personality disorders make you manipulative, but that's the most manipulative bullshit I've ever heard. Your partner is an adult and doesn't need to be treated like a child or an unruly puppy.

So this is my reminder to you, gentle reader: a mental illness makes someone hurt.

It makes them tired. It makes them feel big things. Try to remember that the troubling symptoms you are seeing are not just symptoms of mental illness, they are symptoms of pain. They are coping mechanisms for pain and fear. No, those coping mechanisms shouldn't be allowed to hurt you, but if all you're doing is managing symptoms and expecting your partner to change or control themselves, you're setting both of you up for failure.

American Land Magic

Fantasy novels that imply that European countries would have older or stronger land magic than the Americas make me so mad.

It’s an erasure of centuries of history of the land and the people who lived here. It’s an assumption that white people’s magic is better for some reason.

Look, I’ve hung out a little in the English countryside but I’ve also driven through and over The Appalachian mountains at sunset, and I’ve walked through the Badlands and the Black Forest and let me fucking tell you. America has some places with some pretty damn strong land magic.
The white cliffs of Dover are neat and all, but stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and talk to me again.

The magic of North America is wild and raw and big. It pools in the valleys and flows in the rivers. It tastes like spiritual cultures I won’t even pretend I know enough about to name. It’s been shaped by native hands and native beliefs. It flowers on the Great Plains and it lives in the ghosts of the great New England forests. It climbs up the redwoods and twines around their roots. It’s been ground down by glaciers and has settled and been worn away in the oldest mountain ranges.

Excuse me while I go write a couple hundred books about this.

It's Just Hard

Learning about your own avoidant coping mechanisms is hard. It means a lot of self-correction, a lot of turning against your first inclination. It means leaning into your feelings and letting them happen and sometimes telling other people you wouldn’t normally tell. It means not making a joke or running away. It means breaking habits that feel like they’re protecting you. It means making yourself vulnerable and saying the right thing even when it scares you and you don’t believe it because that is actual therapeutic practice.

It’s hard. It’s so hard, and it’s so much work. I don’t have the uplifting part right now. It’s just hard.

Sing to the Oysters

These are two of my favorite quotes... I won’t say of all time, or out of all the books I’ve read. I’ve read a lot of books, and have a lot of favorites. But these are high on the list. These don’t make the most sense without context, but they feel sunshine-y bright, and they feel like the person I want to be in the world.

——

“He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.

Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.

It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.”

-Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

——

“God in heaven’s been raising you for this valley from the day you were born."

I was furious. He didn’t know anything about me or the day I was born or he’d never say such a foolish thing, sitting there so piously at his kitchen table, sounding for all the world like a Methodist preacher.

But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz—God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable surname and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.”

-Katherine Patterson, Jacob Have I Loved

Thankful

Thanksgiving 2017

Okay so I made my grouchy status already, here’s the sappy one.

Today is a day to be thankful, to look at your life and be grateful for what you have. This has been a hard year for gratitude, I’m gonna be honest. But I will look at my life over the past year and extend grace to it and to myself.

I am grateful for my family. We are safe and mostly happy and mostly healthy, and that’s what counts.

I am grateful for my friends. I’ve hit some incredibly rough patches this year, and every single time my friends have stepped up to help me out. Y’all have shown me what it’s like to have a support system. Even on my hardest day what I felt most was love.

I am grateful for mental health treatment. I started seeing a psychiatrist in April, and it has changed my life. I’m on medication for bipolar disorder, something I’ve been sure I had for a couple years now. I’m also on medication for ADHD, which I never would have imagined. These things, along with therapy, have contributed to this being my most emotionally stable year in recent memory.

I am grateful for my amazing partners. Benjamin Shelton and Charlie Rossander have improved this year beyond measure, showing me love and kindness and patience and support and joy. They are both ridiculous people who remind me regularly to take care of myself and give me the opportunity to help take care of them. Between the two of them, there is nothing I have to hold alone, and nothing I feel incapable of. Thank you.

I am grateful for the sun and the clouds and the ocean and the trees and everything that reminds me to see beauty anywhere it exists.

I am grateful for my awe and my wonder and my joyous child’s heart.

Say thank you. Look at your life and say thank you.

Name Your Demons

As anyone who has read Harry Potter knows, fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself. I’ve spent several years trying as hard as I can not to say the name of the person who hurt me. I’ve called him “shitty abusive ex” many times, and long enough that the times that I did say his name were enough to hurt me and have him on my mind for days.

I’m done with that. I will name my demons, to myself and those around me. I won’t name him here because that... isn’t the point. But I won’t hide from it in my own heart. He is not a monster. He is a man who did bad things. He is a man who I met at the wrong time in both of our lives.

I’ve had to spend some time talking and thinking about him over the past few days because some events in my current life have felt far too similar to events from that point in time. They are not related, but my mind tied a string between them nonetheless. But taking the time to unravel that string means I’ve looked at those events more thoroughly. I have examined their continued influence over me and I’ve gotten one step closer to excising that influence from my life.

If you can, speak the name of your demons. If you can’t yet, don’t feel bad. Even some of the strongest wizards were afraid of You Know Who. It took Ron Weasley a long time to overcome his fear too.

Oceans

Is it any wonder we invented monsters and gods and the end of the world, looking out over an expanse like this?

It took some of us, called us away and never gave us back. And those who returned came with stories of things we couldn’t believe or imagine.

There’s still so much we don’t know, and so much to learn, and so much damage we can do.

“There’s a line where the sky meets the sea, and it calls me.”

Love in the Little Moments

Sometimes, it’s the little moments. The little gestures. The story someone tells that feels like home and safe and me too and I understand you. The things that feel like love, that feel worthy of love. Sure, sometimes it’s a big moving gift or a grand gesture or a proclamation. But sometimes it’s just light that’s been building in your chest for weeks and the small silly thing that finally makes it spill over.

It’s grackles and video games and chainmail and cartoons and data analysis and party prep and fancy drinks and try this and tell me about it.

#nationalcomingoutday

10/11/17

Anybody who has been paying attention to my Facebook feed lately should not be particularly surprised about this one:

I’m polyamorous. If you google polyamory, the definition you’ll get is: the philosophy or state of being in love or romantically involved with more than one person at the same time. I am absolutely capable of (and pretty enthusiastic about) maintaining and fostering romantic feelings and relationships with multiple people at the same time, with everyone aware and consenting to the extent of their desire.

Why this matters today: I’m dating this really great guy, Benjamin Shelton, and I’ve been feeling like I can’t talk about him and how great he is because he’s also dating this pretty spectacular girl, Charli. I’m done with that. These people are important to me, they are both open about their lives and they’ve helped give me the confidence to be open about mine.

For those playing along at home, the scoreboard is thus. Bisexual, genderfluid (they/them pronouns, folks), and polyam. Usually open for questions, as long as they’re polite and preferably can’t be answered by a quick google search. Thanks for listening.

A hard day

Sometimes, you think you've made it through a hard day unscathed. You functioned, you laughed, you hung out with family, you got important shit done, you even made plans and went out for the night. You think you've made it through and you're okay.

And then you get to the end of that day and finally stop moving. You stop pushing yourself to stay functional and upright. And then you curl up in a friend's lap and sob about as hard as you can remember doing for a solid ten minutes.

And sometimes the only thought on your mind is "I want to go home."

Reachy

I'm reach-y right now. Hands out, grasping at strings of affection, regretting that the people I want are all far away. I value my room to move and the excuse to run away occasionally, but when I find myself putting a hand out to brush a shoulder that isn't there, it aches a little. I'll be okay, I'll make it through, and if I do it right I won't annoy my people with repetitive mentions of fondness and need. But my heart is reaching, trying to cross a distance that I just can't cover right now. Forgive me if I seem a little distracted, not all of me is here right now.

Angry?

I tend to have a very difficult time expressing hurt feelings and a difficult time expressing anger. This is especially true when the situation involves people that I am close to or people that I respect. I am afraid they will reject me, that they will be upset with me for being upset, or that I am overreacting to the situation at hand. I am afraid that I will get anger or ridicule in response or that my hurt feelings will be an inconvenience for the other person, and that will make them less willing to spend time with me.

This usually means that I either keep the issue to myself indefinitely, which tends to foster resentment, or I talk about it only at the point where I am blowing up or breaking down. This tends to makes it a much bigger problem than it needed to be.

I’m working on it. I’m working on trusting and validating my own feelings and perception of events. I’m working on letting myself be upset, letting myself sit in those feelings and remember that being upset with someone I love doesn’t mean I don’t love them. I’m working on knowing that my hurt feelings are absolutely enough reason to talk about it, to ask for help or communication. My hurt feelings are valid and important. My hurt feelings are not a burden I am placing on someone else’s shoulders.

I’m also working on trusting the people I love. I’m working on reminding myself that these people aren’t jerks, they don’t want to hurt me, and most of them deserve the benefit of the doubt. If I trust them enough to love them and spend time with them, I need to give them the chance to fuck up or get it right.

This work is difficult and scary, but I know that it’s worth it. It will make me happier and healthier in the long run, and it will make me a better friend and partner.